One career, many obsessions

The profession

I have spent close to two decades inside Indian Oil Corporation — India's largest energy company — and the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas. I started in the engine room: running enterprise SAP landscapes, national data centres, and the networks that keep fuel moving across hundreds of locations. Infrastructure teaches you a specific kind of humility — when systems this large fail, they fail publicly, and someone has to answer for it.

Four days in July 2014 changed the arc of that career and took me to New Delhi, as an advisor to the Ministry on digital platforms and public engagement — building the systems through which citizens actually reach their government. (That story deserves its own essay, and it has one.)

Since then the work has moved steadily toward the energy transition: a multi-billion dollar city-gas portfolio, clean-fuel expansion across 600+ retail locations in Odisha, and now, from Mumbai, leading retail transformation for Indian Oil — the deployment of India's largest EV-charging network, more than 16,000 chargers across highways, cities, and commercial corridors, and the battery-swapping infrastructure growing beside it. Much of that work happens in rooms with ministry officials and regulators, shaping the frameworks that make clean mobility viable at national scale.

The work has also taken me into the wider world of energy: the 22nd World Petroleum Congress in Istanbul in 2017; a twenty-day European study tour in 2019 as part of my MBA at MDI Gurgaon — completing modules in International Marketing and International Finance at ESCP Europe's Berlin campus under its Overseas Learning Programme, and visiting the OPEC secretariat in Vienna alongside industry stops across the continent; and a month in Sri Lanka on a consultancy assignment with Lanka IOC, IndianOil's international subsidiary there.

On the national EV stage

• Nominated member (representing IndianOil), FICCI Sub-group on Charging & Swapping Infrastructure
• Member, Pricing & Policy Committees, Unified Bharat e-Charge Network (UBC)
• Nodal officer, PM E-Drive and FAME-II subsidy schemes, IndianOil

At the cost of sleep

Somewhere along the way, operating large systems stopped being enough — I wanted to understand problems from the inside, by building. There was only one honest place to find the time: doctors recommend a minimum of sleep, and my curiosity has been negotiating it down for years. What happens in those reclaimed hours is not an occupation of any kind — it is a discipline: studying how different industries fail the people they serve, and writing software that tries to do better. Real code, real stakes, real consequences when I am wrong.

I taught myself to build autonomous trading systems, and then kept going until they genuinely ran without me — systems that research, decide, execute, and adapt on their own, trading my own capital and nobody else's. I am building ChargeMark and Project Electra — two sides of the EV-charging ecosystem I know from the inside: one tests networks for compliance, the other is the management platform that runs them. I am building Omnivive, a privacy-first iOS app that estimates calories from a photo of your plate. And I am prototyping Shramik Setu, a bridge between India's informal workers and dignified, verifiable work — the kind of problem that does not trend, but matters to hundreds of millions. And I am teaching machines to answer the phone: voice agents that handle a business's customer calls in the caller's own language. Markets, mobility, health, labour, language — the sectors differ; the method does not.

The common thread: I like problems where an institution's insight meets a builder's speed. Twenty years inside large systems taught me where they break. Building taught me that small, serious software can fix things committees cannot.

Where I'm headed

What I am: an energy-transition operator who ships software. What I want to be: a founder of ventures that outlive job titles — products that solve unglamorous, society-scale problems in India, built with the discipline of someone who has run national infrastructure and the impatience of someone who codes at midnight.

If you are working on energy, EV infrastructure, markets, or products for the people the economy overlooks — I would genuinely like to hear from you. Write to me.